This invention relates to comestibles and more particularly to a unique high quality protein adjuvant for the animal and fowl feed industry.
In the formulation of animal and poultry feed it is frequently desirable to include as components, materials which have peculiar and distinctive nutritional properties or flavor appeals but whose incorporation in a formulated feed presents problems in achieving uniform and effective distribution throughout the relatively dry feed masses which comprise normal or specific animal and fowl rations. This is particularly true of those feed stuff components or ingredients which are normally in liquid form and which because of their indigenous hygroscopic character do not permit of their ready drying and subsequent dry storage under normal variated temperature and relative humidity conditions.
Many animal feed millers confine their formulations to the use of normally dry components inasmuch as special equipment and skill is usually required in order to introduce wet material into dry animal feeds and to distribute them uniformly while avoiding overheating, molding, spontaneous combustion and related spoilage manifestations in the resulting comestible mixtures. For this reason, feed millers customarily purchase what are known as feed concentrates or pre-mixes for addition to, and for admixture with, the basic dry grains or meals which constitute the greater proportion of the finally formulated feed.
To this end, we have provided an improved method and product for providing the feed miller an improved animal and fowl feed product and process which combines a rendering plant's upgraded slaughterhouse blood solids or blood meal of substantially 25 to 55 percent solids, for example, with a high silicon grade diatomaceous earth having a high absorbancy and high surface area with a particle size of between 200 and 400 mesh.
With increased awareness of the scientific community to balanced animal nutrition, slaughterhouse blood is becoming increasingly important as a uniform high quality protein adjuvant to the animal and fowl feed industry.
Properly processed blood meal can supply many of the essential amino acid building blocks for growing animals not found in appreciable quantity in the feed grains. The specific amino acids found in blood meal having the greatest interest are lysine, tryptophan, methionine and threonine. It has been found, with some animal groups, that lower protein rations with balanced amino acids, including increased lysine levels, produced better results than high protein diets.
Historically, blood meal is prepared by drying, by various processes, with a wide difference of biological availability of these amino acid groups. Technology in drying blood, in recent years, has not made many new advances further than the steam drying method and the ring flash dryer, with the ring flash dryer producing a high quality product of high biological retention of the critical amino acids, but at the sacrifice of product cost due to a high energy demand to produce the product.
Seven to ten tons of raw mammal blood (depending on percentage of blood solids) are required to produce one ton of ring dried blood meal. In this process, raw blood is coagulated by steam, centrifuged to dewater to 40 to 50 percent blood solids, then passed through the high temperature ring dryer by air entrainment. The product produced is used primarily to enhance the protein value of other supplemental feed products.